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Comment by gniv | Hacker News Reader

I grew up hearing these stories in the '80s. But I also heard that the research papers published under her name were actually quite good, as in true advances in polymer research. Can anyone with domain knowledge comment?

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As the article states, there's nothing particular about the papers, it's just that some Romanian scientist teams were required to put her name in front of theirs when publishing.

In essence, if you have power, it's just as easy to get people to call you Professor Doctor Engineer as it is to get them to call you Grand Poobah or Supreme Chancellor.

> some Romanian scientist teams were required to put her name in front of theirs when publishing

Would never happen in the capitalist west, where the only names on scientific papers are people involved in the experiment, and the name order is by who did the most work!

While we do see cases where papers include e.g. principal investigators who just got the funding or the supervisors of the grad students who did the actual experiments, adding random politicians with no connection to the studies is IMHO exceptionally rare, mostly because politicians have less direct power to force their country's scientists to do it publicly and keep their mouths shut - instead we're seeing plagiarism cases exposed, like the recent German case of (should-not-be-a-)Dr. Giffey and the earlier scandal of (not-anymore-a-Dr.) zu Guttenberg, and a bunch of others.

However, I'm not really implying a qualitative difference - I'd fully agree that anyone in the capitalist west who has "made" all their publications by somehow arranging to be included in the authors' list should be considered not as scientists but as frauds, just like Ms. Ceausescu.

I grew-up in a family of soviet scientists. Fraudulent practice of putting name of some high ranking official on scientific paper(in order to get PhD) was rampant. However, most of those papers were D-grade papers that no one would read. To this day, Russian apparatus practices this BS. There are(were?) websites dedicated to exposing those papers.

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